No, I'm just saying that in the symmetry broken state the character of the bonds between the negatively and positively charged boron atoms is unlikely to be purely characterizable as either 'ionic' or 'covalent'. It may be enough one or the other to make sense to call it one thing or the other, but the two terms are generalizations of the extremes of a continuum where bonds in any given actual compound partake of both characters to a certain extent.
That was why I brought up the example of water, which is one of those molecules which illustrates the intermediate part of that continuum fairly well. The whole concept is a bit of a generalization of the real underlying quantum mechanical situation.
In a crystal of table salt there are no molecules. No one Na+ is associated with any one given Cl-. The crystal is made up of alternating Na and Cl atoms, sort of like a checkerboard.
Highly ionic crystalline solids are compounds, but not composed of molecules, and in fact NaCl is NEVER a molecule. In aqueous solution it dissociates entirely. If you melt it you still have a situation where the various atoms move freely in the now liquid substance.
Very few highly ionic substances, salts, even CAN be vaporized. They are so polar that at the extreme temperatures required you basically just tear atoms off the stuff and end up with a big cloud of ions.
In a sense you could think of a crystal of salt as a single large macromolecule. Diamond would be an example of a somewhat similar covalently bonded structure.
Extremely polar molecules like NaCl, salts, are so polar that they hardly share electrons at all. Thus the vast majority of the forces that hold them together are purely electrical charge, as opposed to the case of covalance where the bond is stabilized due to the formation of an energy level which favors stability.
In these types of compounds there ARE no molecules per-se. There is no one Na+ that is associated with a specific Cl-.
Still, the original point was that chemical bonds are understood to have both ionic and covalent components, and most bonds are not clearly at one extreme or the other.
Good old Columbus... I grew up around Dayton, I sure know what Ohio politics is like, lol. Nice enough place though.
See, I think we aren't drastically far off in what we ACTUALLY envisage. I think this is essentially what happened with the framers of the Constitution. They had certain logical reasons for wanting to follow certain principles, but they also had the problem that eventually they had to have an actual government and that government would have to function in the real world, REGARDLESS of those principles. I'm not saying in VIOLATION of them, but it had to be able to say in some sense "OK, we actually need to purchase this chunk of North America and technically we cannot do it, so we're going to have to wiggle a bit here."
In EXTREME cases even the sorts of arguments that GWB made for spying on people ARE cogent arguments (I'm not saying HE had justification to rely on those arguments). If the choice is really between the collapse of the government and taking an action beyond its authority, then in a sense the duty of the officers of government IS to maintain it and follow the rules as best as is possible. Then it is the responsibility of the citizens to make a judgment about those actions.
As a British friend of mine once said "We don't understand this fascination you Americans have with this piece of paper. Paper doesn't make men free, only men can make themselves free."
I actually share your reluctance at the prospect of drastically editing the Constitution. Maybe for somewhat different reasons than you have. Frankly I don't think the current citizens of the US are all that much in a mind set to insist on their rights being upheld anymore. They've forgotten the lessons of history (which most of them know nothing about anyway).
The whole debate about spending authority comes down to the basic issue of "what practically MUST be done". For example, there is no clear explicit authority for the Federal Government to regulate pollution. However it IS necessary for our modern society to have such regulation. When we didn't have that regulation the Cayahoga River BURNED, remember that? I saw it, it was pretty nasty.
You could ask "can't the states do that"? But the answer is apparently "no, not really". Every time Vermont (where I live now) tries to deal with some environmental problem businesses up and threaten to just move over to some other state where they can buy off people and do what they want. Nowadays they just threaten to move to China. So we really HAD to have, realistically, some national regulations. It was a necessity and it would be immoral to ignore a necessity.
Windows lacks a really clear separation between what is in the realm of the user and what is in the realm of the administrator. This is the real root of the problem.
Unix based systems started out as multi-user timesharing systems. From day one you owned exactly one set of filesystem resources, your home directory, and nothing else. An admin CAN create other shared directories, but there is a clear boundary between user and admin. ALL developers know this, it is very clear. Any administrator knows this, they can count on it, it is a very simple rule to understand "home directory belong to user, not home directory not belong to user".
The real problem with windows is who knows who the heck is supposed to own what? User related 'stuff' is scattered willy nilly all over the hard drive, and what and where it is varies with wild abandon between different versions of windows. There is simply no clear cut rule, and thus developers aren't really encouraged to understand the separation because it isn't simple or straightforward. Instead it is complex and you need to know different rules for different versions of windows.
Now in theory maybe this shouldn't be a problem. In theory your developers can go hunt up what the rules are in some knowledge base somewhere. In theory. In practice they are paid to get the product out the door. In practice they don't have a whole lot of extra time to waste on dealing with MS inept handling of the whole issue. In reality they just elevate the privs of their installer and get on with their real jobs.
All bonds between different species are at least PARTLY 'ionic' in character. At least until now though NO bonds between like species have demonstrated ANY ionic character (at least that I know of). So it is interesting.
Which you've described reasonably well. 2 H's and an O will quite happily share electrons and come out of your tap too. That bond is not an 'even split' though, the oxygen holds tighter to the electrons and gets more than its 'fair share' of them.
Water is somewhat 'sticky' (viscous) because of this fact. The O part of it has a bit of a negative charge, and the H parts a bit of a positive charge, so it is a 'polar' molecule and the H side of one water sticks a bit to the O side of the next one. This gives water its very high boiling point and other interesting properties.
In terms of types of bonds it is a mixture, partly covalent, partly ionic.
Common hydrogen gas, is 2 hydrogen atoms sharing TWO electrons. It is a reasonably stable and entirely covalent compound. That is you cannot say that one hydrogen has BOTH electrons and the other hydrogen has none. Each one has a 'share' of both electrons at once, and that share is exactly equal.
The difference with this boron boride is that some of the boron atoms have a bigger share of the electrons than others, which is at the very least pretty unusual for a compound with only one type of element in it.
By ordinary 'textbook' chemistry like you would learn in Chem 101 you would say 'impossible', but that's mostly because textbook chemistry is a bunch of generalizations that provide a 'good enough' answer MOST of the time for common cases.
Sort of like if you say 'my Farrari can beat any car on the road'. It may be true, but then there will come that day when you spin a main bearing and get dusted. All the chemists are agog! (and I worked in the obligatory car analogy, yippeee!;)
Not to say you are at all wrong, it is a good explanation, but the distinction between 'ionic' and 'covalent' bonds is really one of a matter of degree between 2 extremes.
At the one extreme we have single element compounds like H2 or O2 in which the electronegativity of the component atoms is (by definition) equal and thus have an even charge distribution and are entirely covalent. This is the simplest case.
At the other extreme we have substances like NaCl which are made up of atoms with extremely different electronegativities. However there is no such thing as a purely 'ionic' bond. Even in an extremely polar molecule like NaCl the charge distribution isn't ENTIRELY Na+1 and Cl-1. It very nearly is, but not quite.
MOST compounds are far less clear cut. Even H2O's bonds, which are fairly polar and is composed of 2 species with very different electronegativity the bond is generally characterized as having both an ionic and a covalent character.
So, our boron boride is also going to be a compound which is not going to be entirely clearly either ionic nor covalent.
The real problem is that these terms only signify useful generalizations about how chemical species behave. While chemistry CAN be reduced to physics in a reasonably straightforward way in principle, the reality is that most of the terms and most of the ways chemists ordinarily think about chemistry is a set of 'rules of thumb' which are based as much on observation and valued as much for their general utility as they are based on precise formulations of fundamental laws and processes. Even the notion of 'compound' is really to a certain extent a convenience and necessarily gets a bit fuzzy at the 'edges'.
Heh, yeah, quoting lots of text is a pain,;) Don't worry, I follow you.
In my opinion it is educational to look at what people have said in the past, but it is also instructive to look at what they did. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc SAID a lot of things. They also DID a lot of things, and frankly their actions speak louder than their words. Jefferson DID take an expansive interpretation. He DID purchase Louisiana. There are numerous other examples as well.
Beyond that it is IMHO a quite limited view of the thinking of that time period to believe that one or a few people's views adequately encompass all the diversity of opinion of that time as to what was intended by the Constitution. It wasn't written or put in force by a few men. The Constitutional Convention was a whole body of people and if you continue to read, even within those sets of documents you or I have mentioned you will find a whole range of things considered and things said.
Those things which are NEEDFUL to be done must be done. Pure and simple. Congress may, and does, appropriate money for those needful purposes. There ARE real and practicable limits to the authority of Congress which are substantial and tangible today. I don't agree that Congress is outside of its authority to requisition funds for those needful purposes. Its POWERS, the specific means which it can take to its ends are limited, but not its ability to work to those ends. Even Jefferson obviously saw that.
The way money is appropriated and spent today is a direct consequence of the way the Congress is structured. Unless that is changed there will not be a substantive change in the way it functions. You're perfectly welcome to have a different opinion on that, but if you actually look at what Congress HAS done, historically, throughout the history of the United States you will see quite quickly that it functions now essentially as it has functioned since the beginning. These problems were always there. When you exclude from consideration the practical solutions you are just limiting yourself to thinking 'inside the box' and you won't solve the problems that require thinking outside that box.
There is nothing 'sacred' about the structure of our government. It is a tool. Instituted amongst men to serve their needs, and we have every right and indeed every responsibility to make and remake it as we see fit and as we in our however limited wisdom believe it needs to be made. If it is broken, fix it. It IS broken.
Assuming your invention is not already covered by someone else's patent, then essentially, no. IANAL, naturally, but I think you basically would just want to get a good description of the patentable claims, probably with a reference implementation, out there.
If I understand the legal situation correctly the formulation is something like your prior art has to be 'published'. My guess would be the more prominently, the stronger its claim is. In other words ideally in some "major" print publication dealing with the subject matter might be ideal.
An RFC might not be a bad idea either. Or two as the case may be.
Getting a patent issued in any case is not strictly required and as you observe, kind of expensive and time consuming as well. The only thing having a patent would likely do for you is allow you to refuse to license purely commercial implementations or collect royalties from them. Doesn't really sound like either of those things are on your agenda.
No doubt. The inherently winner take all setup of the Electoral College doesn't help either.
If you look at other countries certain patterns seem to emerge. Presidential systems modeled after the US system tend to be more authoritarian centralized states for example.
Any political system which attempts to balance power between different groups HAS to by its very nature lead to political compromise, otherwise it would just be a 'tyranny of the majority' (at best). So we have to look for a way to allocate representation in which the representatives are least attached to one specific constituency if we don't want the process to be simply a game of 'give me some pork and I'll give you some'. Whatever that way of organizing the legislature is, that's the solution to the problem.
See, I have read it. I've read all of this stuff, many times no less. I don't know where you get this idea that there was ever some mythical interpretation of the Constitution that was ever universally held that is what you are advocating. It has NEVER been interpreted that way. Well, certainly there have been people who have claimed to interpret it that way, like say Thomas Jefferson, who as soon as he was elected President immediately went out and made the Louisiana Purchase.
You are entirely correct when you say that Congress does not have unlimited power to make laws on any subject. I don't even disagree with you that the authority of Congress has been stretched well beyond what was originally intended, but an appropriation of money is not a law. The two things are different. Article I provides for Congress the power to raise and spend money. If you read the Federalist Papers you will find that Hamilton was CERTAINLY clear in his opinion of what Congress could do.
Not everyone who doesn't happen to agree with you on all points is ignorant or foolish. In fact, as I've said before, I stand in very good company. There is simply a divergence of opinions on how to interpret and use the Constitution. It would be nice if there weren't and it was all spelled out with infinite clarity, but it isn't. It wasn't even DESIGNED to be entirely clear.
Obviously we don't agree. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Nobody can prove what a differently structured legislature WOULD actually do, but I stand in good company.
As far as your interpretation of the Constitution goes, the problem with it is it is just plain considered to be wrong by pretty much everyone who has ever had a say in interpreting it. Nothing in Article I says that Congress may not appropriate money for any purpose. If it does, then I'm blind and can't see it and neither apparently has any federal judge in the history of the United States seen it.
What if we... got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,
The first part of that would seem to be a step in the right direction. It would still be pretty easy to block legislation in the Senate though. Maybe the Senate realistically should just get a 'yeah' or 'nay' on appropriations, no modification allowed. I don't know how you would do that second thing, who would decide the criteria for who 'understands the policies'? That person/group/body/whatever would now be in a position to decide who gets to vote. Nobody gets that power in my Republic...
required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,
Again, there is no body that could be vested with the authority to make this decision. It is nice to WANT something like this, but it has to be actually practicable as well.
enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,
And again, there is no way to actually enforce such a provision, thus it would be mere empty words.
required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,
Uh, AGAIN, who decides these things? This is simply not possible. Legislation does not consist (usually) of a single law. It generally makes "patches" to any number of existing statutes in order to effect some end. It would be practically impossible to attain consistency. Who exactly would interpret the law and how would these people check the consistency of one law against another? Besides I don't see this as a problem.
required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,
That is like dictating that 'All automobiles must weigh less than 200 pounds'. It is simply an impossibility for any modern society. And who gets to decide what is 'knowable' and how small 'small' is?
gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,
And now you will never get anything done because every single court from now to eternity will be permanently doing nothing but processing an endless repetitive stream of filings against every single law there is with no end.
federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,
Or alternatively so they can spend their time endlessly suing everyone else at no cost to themselves. We already do have a right to representation in our defense. We also have the ability (and have used it) to set up private organizations which can take on worthy cases, like the ACLU.
rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,
Congress decides what courts exist and what their jurisdiction is. If more courts are required then we just need to have Congress set them up and fund them.
made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,
I don't know what this means. How is that different from what we have now? Sure, people cannot often afford every appeal they would like to make or ideally should have available to them, but there has to be a practical way to accomplish this in order for it to be mandated.
made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),
And why is it you would pick on a particular segment of the population? Who gets to decide who is or isn't 'a lawyer', and doesn't it strike you as a bit unjust to say to someone "Oh, you took the bar exam, you no longer have your rights as a citizen". So
Orion's actual PAYLOAD was very small. Even a one man expedition would require orders of magnitude more energy to reach even 0.12 C. Now multiply that by 1000 for 1000 people, multiply it again by some factor for all the life support they need and equipment they would need. Now you have what may well be an infeasibly large and expensive craft.
Also, Orion and the various other studies are nothing like being actual feasible starship designs any more than Jules Verne's space gun was a feasible design for a moon rocket. The space gun would WORK in a sense, it doesn't outright violate the laws of physics and probably could be built, it just couldn't put a man on the moon in one piece.
Likewise Orion, Daedalus, etc only consider a few basic aspects of the problem of star flight. There are vast areas which they either simply didn't address or just papered over. Things like how does your craft actually survive plowing through the interstellar medium at.12 C? How does it avoid being destroyed by the first grain of dust it encounters? (there aren't many things in interstellar space, but there are about 5 hydrogen atoms per m3). How are the electronics (or whatever) protected against the flux of galactic cosmic rays?
These probes were also only designed as FLYBY missions. If you want to stop at the other end then you have to either carry a whole second fuel supply (multiplying the total fuel requirements of the initial craft by a factor of 1000 or so) or come up with some other way of braking, which again requires a bunch of equipment that has to be carried for that purpose and again increasing your fuel requirements by a large amount.
So once you start adding in all the things that would be required to make an ACTUAL working manned starship that would have a range of a few light years you have one heck of a ginormous thing you have to build which would require ridiculous amounts of energy, like on the scale of all the energy produced by a type II civilization for several years.
Now, finally, add the factor of RISK onto all your calculations. What is the probability of the success of an individual mission? This huge investment isn't guaranteed to have ANY payoff, and certainly if you were doing it for the first time you would have to consider the probability of failure to be reasonably large.
And then of course it is pretty hard to imagine WHAT the payoff for the people sending the craft out would even be. "Several generations from now there will be some scientific data returned by this mission". OK, yeah. That might get us to send a probe. I fail to see why anyone would be so motivated to send a colony ship that they would pay the huge cost.
The problem is that every Congress Person who doesn't bring home the bacon to their district isn't going to get reelected, thus every bill basically has to guarantee something for every district. This is a function of the fact that each representative is only accountable to their own little part of the country.
Nothing in the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from spending money on things that primarily benefit local areas. Congress has limited authority to make laws. It doesn't have limited authority to spend money. These are two different things and should not be confused. The only limits on Congress' ability to spend money are that it can only make an appropriation for the "Army" for a two year period, and 'from time to time' a 'complete accounting' of what money was appropriated and spent must be prepared.
If we want to FIX the mess we have with how our money is spent, then we are going to have to make some serious and sweeping changes in the structure of the legislative branch of our government.
One might ask why other countries, like the UK, which has a Parliament elected from districts don't have similar problems. In part they answer is that they do, but being a MUCH less geographically extended state the problem is a lot less apparent because the districts are much smaller and so close together that money going to any one district also benefits a bunch of other nearby ones. This makes it far easier for an MP to simply act in the general interest.
Travel times for a large ship would HAVE to be immense, not just large, but stupendous large. A massive ship that could sustain 100's of passengers for 10's of thousands of years in the hard radiation environment of interstellar space? Maybe it just can't be done. Maybe no kind of self replicating repair systems and AIs and whatever else would be needed is just possible to build in such a way as to give even a 1 in 1000 chance of success.
The amount of power that would be required to propel this massive ship would simply be truly astounding and nobody yet has demonstrated that it will ever be possible for humans to generate those sorts of power levels.
Maybe by the time you add up all the massive complex of equipment you need on top of the engine and the fuel required for the biggest thing we can launch there simply isn't enough room left for crew?
Maybe our new robotic overlords will be smarter than us and I salute our star drivin' overlords!
Einstein said that he did not believe in "spooky action at a distance". He never said anything about it being an argument based on relativity.
Yet this stuff has been proven time and time again. It is simply observed fact that no information is ever exchanged via quantum entanglement. It is not a matter of there being 500 possible ways it could happen and we've only eliminated 10. It is DEMONSTRATED not to happen at all.
âoeNo physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics."
This theorem has been demonstrated by experiment to hold, thus no transmission of information by QM AT ALL, ever.
Hope may spring eternal, but it is as futile a hope as that of the perpetual motion machine proponents. This also reinforces Relativity's ban on superluminal information/matter/energy but the two stand independent of one another. Thus you would have to overthrow BOTH theories at once, and thus ALL of the well attested standard model to get out of that jam.
Who says that interstellar travel is even possible? We don't even know what the limits of technology are, and humans, or anything resembling human may never leave this star system.
And if our technology DOES continue to advance like it is now, we'll certainly find a way to destroy ourselves because any energy large enough to launch starships will be a devastating weapon.
Not every human has to be wiped out either. Scattered weak humans without their tools and unaccustomed to surviving in the wilderness, they might not do so well in a toxic waste filled future earth.
And even a moderately large space civilization might not be able to untether itself 100% from the home planet, maybe not for 1000's of years.
What nobody is commenting on either is that who says 1000 years is at the short end of the estimate we should use? Maybe its more like 106 years, in which case this one is it;) In that case the number of civilizations that are cut off from each other is REALLY large. A few will get lucky, most won't.
But that doesn't mean it isn't solved, or more like it isn't really a paradox.
What law of nature says that life bearing planets have to be common? Depending on what parameters you plug into the Drake Equation you may or may not have a problem.
It is perfectly easy for me to imagine that life, or at least intelligent technological life that wants to communicate with someone else, has arisen exactly ONE time in our galaxy. Or at least few enough times that we are unlikely to ever overlap with it.
Oh, yeah, we have this Congress which is elected district by district, so EVERY SINGLE BILL has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.
Don't blame Congress for this, the Constitution we have was designed for an 18th century agrarian society. No matter how carefully it was designed the resulting system cannot possibly be ideal for a modern 21st century post industrial society.
But cheer up, once the country has been misgoverned by this abomination into total collapse then the fascists will come in and fix everything.
Of course people could just wake up and realize they need to actually DO something about it now, but nah its easier to just sit on the couch, bitch about it, and have a few more chips and a beer.
The delta v between your typical Amor class earth crossing asteroid and the Earth-Moon system is on the order of a few meters per second. In other words if you could stand on it and chuck a rock, you could hit the Earth.
Existing propulsion technology could easily move one of these rocks around. It would be expensive and take time, but it could probably be done without requiring the invention of any fundamentally new technology.
A 100 meter diameter rock like Apophis would mass on the order of a gigaton or so. It would take a good bit of work, but it isn't at all unrealistic.
But I would wager that many people 100 years ago would have said that some of the things we observe today would remain forever hidden as well. Obviously if some part of the universe really is fundamentally unobservable and causally disconnected from the part we can observe then any theorizing (to use the term loosely) we might engage in relative to that is no more scientifically valuable than a fantasy novel.
But it may turn out that there are some subtle effects we can measure. Some formulations of quantum gravity seem to suggest we might be able to observe some effects of the configuration of the universe previous to the big bang for instance. Likewise if there is some sort of 'shadow universe' it might leave some mark on what we do observe. The two could have some very slight effect on each other or they might have influenced each other at a much earlier epoch in our universe's history that has left some trace.
Given that it seems our understanding of the architecture of the universe itself is still at a fairly elementary level there is a lot of terra incognita out there still. It will be interesting to see what sorts of discoveries we make in the next 100 years.
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No, I'm just saying that in the symmetry broken state the character of the bonds between the negatively and positively charged boron atoms is unlikely to be purely characterizable as either 'ionic' or 'covalent'. It may be enough one or the other to make sense to call it one thing or the other, but the two terms are generalizations of the extremes of a continuum where bonds in any given actual compound partake of both characters to a certain extent.
That was why I brought up the example of water, which is one of those molecules which illustrates the intermediate part of that continuum fairly well. The whole concept is a bit of a generalization of the real underlying quantum mechanical situation.
In a crystal of table salt there are no molecules. No one Na+ is associated with any one given Cl-. The crystal is made up of alternating Na and Cl atoms, sort of like a checkerboard.
Highly ionic crystalline solids are compounds, but not composed of molecules, and in fact NaCl is NEVER a molecule. In aqueous solution it dissociates entirely. If you melt it you still have a situation where the various atoms move freely in the now liquid substance.
Very few highly ionic substances, salts, even CAN be vaporized. They are so polar that at the extreme temperatures required you basically just tear atoms off the stuff and end up with a big cloud of ions.
In a sense you could think of a crystal of salt as a single large macromolecule. Diamond would be an example of a somewhat similar covalently bonded structure.
Extremely polar molecules like NaCl, salts, are so polar that they hardly share electrons at all. Thus the vast majority of the forces that hold them together are purely electrical charge, as opposed to the case of covalance where the bond is stabilized due to the formation of an energy level which favors stability.
In these types of compounds there ARE no molecules per-se. There is no one Na+ that is associated with a specific Cl-.
Still, the original point was that chemical bonds are understood to have both ionic and covalent components, and most bonds are not clearly at one extreme or the other.
Good old Columbus... I grew up around Dayton, I sure know what Ohio politics is like, lol. Nice enough place though.
See, I think we aren't drastically far off in what we ACTUALLY envisage. I think this is essentially what happened with the framers of the Constitution. They had certain logical reasons for wanting to follow certain principles, but they also had the problem that eventually they had to have an actual government and that government would have to function in the real world, REGARDLESS of those principles. I'm not saying in VIOLATION of them, but it had to be able to say in some sense "OK, we actually need to purchase this chunk of North America and technically we cannot do it, so we're going to have to wiggle a bit here."
In EXTREME cases even the sorts of arguments that GWB made for spying on people ARE cogent arguments (I'm not saying HE had justification to rely on those arguments). If the choice is really between the collapse of the government and taking an action beyond its authority, then in a sense the duty of the officers of government IS to maintain it and follow the rules as best as is possible. Then it is the responsibility of the citizens to make a judgment about those actions.
As a British friend of mine once said "We don't understand this fascination you Americans have with this piece of paper. Paper doesn't make men free, only men can make themselves free."
I actually share your reluctance at the prospect of drastically editing the Constitution. Maybe for somewhat different reasons than you have. Frankly I don't think the current citizens of the US are all that much in a mind set to insist on their rights being upheld anymore. They've forgotten the lessons of history (which most of them know nothing about anyway).
The whole debate about spending authority comes down to the basic issue of "what practically MUST be done". For example, there is no clear explicit authority for the Federal Government to regulate pollution. However it IS necessary for our modern society to have such regulation. When we didn't have that regulation the Cayahoga River BURNED, remember that? I saw it, it was pretty nasty.
You could ask "can't the states do that"? But the answer is apparently "no, not really". Every time Vermont (where I live now) tries to deal with some environmental problem businesses up and threaten to just move over to some other state where they can buy off people and do what they want. Nowadays they just threaten to move to China. So we really HAD to have, realistically, some national regulations. It was a necessity and it would be immoral to ignore a necessity.
Windows lacks a really clear separation between what is in the realm of the user and what is in the realm of the administrator. This is the real root of the problem.
Unix based systems started out as multi-user timesharing systems. From day one you owned exactly one set of filesystem resources, your home directory, and nothing else. An admin CAN create other shared directories, but there is a clear boundary between user and admin. ALL developers know this, it is very clear. Any administrator knows this, they can count on it, it is a very simple rule to understand "home directory belong to user, not home directory not belong to user".
The real problem with windows is who knows who the heck is supposed to own what? User related 'stuff' is scattered willy nilly all over the hard drive, and what and where it is varies with wild abandon between different versions of windows. There is simply no clear cut rule, and thus developers aren't really encouraged to understand the separation because it isn't simple or straightforward. Instead it is complex and you need to know different rules for different versions of windows.
Now in theory maybe this shouldn't be a problem. In theory your developers can go hunt up what the rules are in some knowledge base somewhere. In theory. In practice they are paid to get the product out the door. In practice they don't have a whole lot of extra time to waste on dealing with MS inept handling of the whole issue. In reality they just elevate the privs of their installer and get on with their real jobs.
All bonds between different species are at least PARTLY 'ionic' in character. At least until now though NO bonds between like species have demonstrated ANY ionic character (at least that I know of). So it is interesting.
Which you've described reasonably well. 2 H's and an O will quite happily share electrons and come out of your tap too. That bond is not an 'even split' though, the oxygen holds tighter to the electrons and gets more than its 'fair share' of them.
Water is somewhat 'sticky' (viscous) because of this fact. The O part of it has a bit of a negative charge, and the H parts a bit of a positive charge, so it is a 'polar' molecule and the H side of one water sticks a bit to the O side of the next one. This gives water its very high boiling point and other interesting properties.
In terms of types of bonds it is a mixture, partly covalent, partly ionic.
Common hydrogen gas, is 2 hydrogen atoms sharing TWO electrons. It is a reasonably stable and entirely covalent compound. That is you cannot say that one hydrogen has BOTH electrons and the other hydrogen has none. Each one has a 'share' of both electrons at once, and that share is exactly equal.
The difference with this boron boride is that some of the boron atoms have a bigger share of the electrons than others, which is at the very least pretty unusual for a compound with only one type of element in it.
By ordinary 'textbook' chemistry like you would learn in Chem 101 you would say 'impossible', but that's mostly because textbook chemistry is a bunch of generalizations that provide a 'good enough' answer MOST of the time for common cases.
Sort of like if you say 'my Farrari can beat any car on the road'. It may be true, but then there will come that day when you spin a main bearing and get dusted. All the chemists are agog! (and I worked in the obligatory car analogy, yippeee! ;)
Not to say you are at all wrong, it is a good explanation, but the distinction between 'ionic' and 'covalent' bonds is really one of a matter of degree between 2 extremes.
At the one extreme we have single element compounds like H2 or O2 in which the electronegativity of the component atoms is (by definition) equal and thus have an even charge distribution and are entirely covalent. This is the simplest case.
At the other extreme we have substances like NaCl which are made up of atoms with extremely different electronegativities. However there is no such thing as a purely 'ionic' bond. Even in an extremely polar molecule like NaCl the charge distribution isn't ENTIRELY Na+1 and Cl-1. It very nearly is, but not quite.
MOST compounds are far less clear cut. Even H2O's bonds, which are fairly polar and is composed of 2 species with very different electronegativity the bond is generally characterized as having both an ionic and a covalent character.
So, our boron boride is also going to be a compound which is not going to be entirely clearly either ionic nor covalent.
The real problem is that these terms only signify useful generalizations about how chemical species behave. While chemistry CAN be reduced to physics in a reasonably straightforward way in principle, the reality is that most of the terms and most of the ways chemists ordinarily think about chemistry is a set of 'rules of thumb' which are based as much on observation and valued as much for their general utility as they are based on precise formulations of fundamental laws and processes. Even the notion of 'compound' is really to a certain extent a convenience and necessarily gets a bit fuzzy at the 'edges'.
Heh, yeah, quoting lots of text is a pain, ;) Don't worry, I follow you.
In my opinion it is educational to look at what people have said in the past, but it is also instructive to look at what they did. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc SAID a lot of things. They also DID a lot of things, and frankly their actions speak louder than their words. Jefferson DID take an expansive interpretation. He DID purchase Louisiana. There are numerous other examples as well.
Beyond that it is IMHO a quite limited view of the thinking of that time period to believe that one or a few people's views adequately encompass all the diversity of opinion of that time as to what was intended by the Constitution. It wasn't written or put in force by a few men. The Constitutional Convention was a whole body of people and if you continue to read, even within those sets of documents you or I have mentioned you will find a whole range of things considered and things said.
Those things which are NEEDFUL to be done must be done. Pure and simple. Congress may, and does, appropriate money for those needful purposes. There ARE real and practicable limits to the authority of Congress which are substantial and tangible today. I don't agree that Congress is outside of its authority to requisition funds for those needful purposes. Its POWERS, the specific means which it can take to its ends are limited, but not its ability to work to those ends. Even Jefferson obviously saw that.
The way money is appropriated and spent today is a direct consequence of the way the Congress is structured. Unless that is changed there will not be a substantive change in the way it functions. You're perfectly welcome to have a different opinion on that, but if you actually look at what Congress HAS done, historically, throughout the history of the United States you will see quite quickly that it functions now essentially as it has functioned since the beginning. These problems were always there. When you exclude from consideration the practical solutions you are just limiting yourself to thinking 'inside the box' and you won't solve the problems that require thinking outside that box.
There is nothing 'sacred' about the structure of our government. It is a tool. Instituted amongst men to serve their needs, and we have every right and indeed every responsibility to make and remake it as we see fit and as we in our however limited wisdom believe it needs to be made. If it is broken, fix it. It IS broken.
Assuming your invention is not already covered by someone else's patent, then essentially, no. IANAL, naturally, but I think you basically would just want to get a good description of the patentable claims, probably with a reference implementation, out there.
If I understand the legal situation correctly the formulation is something like your prior art has to be 'published'. My guess would be the more prominently, the stronger its claim is. In other words ideally in some "major" print publication dealing with the subject matter might be ideal.
An RFC might not be a bad idea either. Or two as the case may be.
Getting a patent issued in any case is not strictly required and as you observe, kind of expensive and time consuming as well. The only thing having a patent would likely do for you is allow you to refuse to license purely commercial implementations or collect royalties from them. Doesn't really sound like either of those things are on your agenda.
Phase 4: Get assaulted in prison
Phase 5: Sue
Phase 6: Profit!
No doubt. The inherently winner take all setup of the Electoral College doesn't help either.
If you look at other countries certain patterns seem to emerge. Presidential systems modeled after the US system tend to be more authoritarian centralized states for example.
Any political system which attempts to balance power between different groups HAS to by its very nature lead to political compromise, otherwise it would just be a 'tyranny of the majority' (at best). So we have to look for a way to allocate representation in which the representatives are least attached to one specific constituency if we don't want the process to be simply a game of 'give me some pork and I'll give you some'. Whatever that way of organizing the legislature is, that's the solution to the problem.
See, I have read it. I've read all of this stuff, many times no less. I don't know where you get this idea that there was ever some mythical interpretation of the Constitution that was ever universally held that is what you are advocating. It has NEVER been interpreted that way. Well, certainly there have been people who have claimed to interpret it that way, like say Thomas Jefferson, who as soon as he was elected President immediately went out and made the Louisiana Purchase.
You are entirely correct when you say that Congress does not have unlimited power to make laws on any subject. I don't even disagree with you that the authority of Congress has been stretched well beyond what was originally intended, but an appropriation of money is not a law. The two things are different. Article I provides for Congress the power to raise and spend money. If you read the Federalist Papers you will find that Hamilton was CERTAINLY clear in his opinion of what Congress could do.
Not everyone who doesn't happen to agree with you on all points is ignorant or foolish. In fact, as I've said before, I stand in very good company. There is simply a divergence of opinions on how to interpret and use the Constitution. It would be nice if there weren't and it was all spelled out with infinite clarity, but it isn't. It wasn't even DESIGNED to be entirely clear.
Obviously we don't agree. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Nobody can prove what a differently structured legislature WOULD actually do, but I stand in good company.
As far as your interpretation of the Constitution goes, the problem with it is it is just plain considered to be wrong by pretty much everyone who has ever had a say in interpreting it. Nothing in Article I says that Congress may not appropriate money for any purpose. If it does, then I'm blind and can't see it and neither apparently has any federal judge in the history of the United States seen it.
What if we ...
got rid of districts and per-state representation entirely, at least in the House, and seated the top 435 vote-getters in a national election where voters would have to show that they knew the policies of the people for whom they were voting,
The first part of that would seem to be a step in the right direction. It would still be pretty easy to block legislation in the Senate though. Maybe the Senate realistically should just get a 'yeah' or 'nay' on appropriations, no modification allowed. I don't know how you would do that second thing, who would decide the criteria for who 'understands the policies'? That person/group/body/whatever would now be in a position to decide who gets to vote. Nobody gets that power in my Republic...
required the representatives to pass a test showing that they actually understood the import of the contents of each bill before voting,
Again, there is no body that could be vested with the authority to make this decision. It is nice to WANT something like this, but it has to be actually practicable as well.
enforceably prohibited legislative vote-trading,
And again, there is no way to actually enforce such a provision, thus it would be mere empty words.
required the whole body of statutes to be self-consistent,
Uh, AGAIN, who decides these things? This is simply not possible. Legislation does not consist (usually) of a single law. It generally makes "patches" to any number of existing statutes in order to effect some end. It would be practically impossible to attain consistency. Who exactly would interpret the law and how would these people check the consistency of one law against another? Besides I don't see this as a problem.
required the whole body of law to be small enough to be knowable,
That is like dictating that 'All automobiles must weigh less than 200 pounds'. It is simply an impossibility for any modern society. And who gets to decide what is 'knowable' and how small 'small' is?
gave all voters standing to sue to strike down any vague or unconstitutional provisions,
And now you will never get anything done because every single court from now to eternity will be permanently doing nothing but processing an endless repetitive stream of filings against every single law there is with no end.
federally funded legal representation in court so people to be able to actually enforce all their presently-theoretical rights,
Or alternatively so they can spend their time endlessly suing everyone else at no cost to themselves. We already do have a right to representation in our defense. We also have the ability (and have used it) to set up private organizations which can take on worthy cases, like the ACLU.
rebuilt the judicial system to get decisions in days or weeks rather than years,
Congress decides what courts exist and what their jurisdiction is. If more courts are required then we just need to have Congress set them up and fund them.
made judicial errors of all types practically and economically reviewable,
I don't know what this means. How is that different from what we have now? Sure, people cannot often afford every appeal they would like to make or ideally should have available to them, but there has to be a practical way to accomplish this in order for it to be mandated.
made lawyers ineligible for election to office or appointment to the bench (judge school separate from law school, as in civil law countries),
And why is it you would pick on a particular segment of the population? Who gets to decide who is or isn't 'a lawyer', and doesn't it strike you as a bit unjust to say to someone "Oh, you took the bar exam, you no longer have your rights as a citizen". So
Orion's actual PAYLOAD was very small. Even a one man expedition would require orders of magnitude more energy to reach even 0.12 C. Now multiply that by 1000 for 1000 people, multiply it again by some factor for all the life support they need and equipment they would need. Now you have what may well be an infeasibly large and expensive craft.
Also, Orion and the various other studies are nothing like being actual feasible starship designs any more than Jules Verne's space gun was a feasible design for a moon rocket. The space gun would WORK in a sense, it doesn't outright violate the laws of physics and probably could be built, it just couldn't put a man on the moon in one piece.
Likewise Orion, Daedalus, etc only consider a few basic aspects of the problem of star flight. There are vast areas which they either simply didn't address or just papered over. Things like how does your craft actually survive plowing through the interstellar medium at .12 C? How does it avoid being destroyed by the first grain of dust it encounters? (there aren't many things in interstellar space, but there are about 5 hydrogen atoms per m3). How are the electronics (or whatever) protected against the flux of galactic cosmic rays?
These probes were also only designed as FLYBY missions. If you want to stop at the other end then you have to either carry a whole second fuel supply (multiplying the total fuel requirements of the initial craft by a factor of 1000 or so) or come up with some other way of braking, which again requires a bunch of equipment that has to be carried for that purpose and again increasing your fuel requirements by a large amount.
So once you start adding in all the things that would be required to make an ACTUAL working manned starship that would have a range of a few light years you have one heck of a ginormous thing you have to build which would require ridiculous amounts of energy, like on the scale of all the energy produced by a type II civilization for several years.
Now, finally, add the factor of RISK onto all your calculations. What is the probability of the success of an individual mission? This huge investment isn't guaranteed to have ANY payoff, and certainly if you were doing it for the first time you would have to consider the probability of failure to be reasonably large.
And then of course it is pretty hard to imagine WHAT the payoff for the people sending the craft out would even be. "Several generations from now there will be some scientific data returned by this mission". OK, yeah. That might get us to send a probe. I fail to see why anyone would be so motivated to send a colony ship that they would pay the huge cost.
The problem is that every Congress Person who doesn't bring home the bacon to their district isn't going to get reelected, thus every bill basically has to guarantee something for every district. This is a function of the fact that each representative is only accountable to their own little part of the country.
Nothing in the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from spending money on things that primarily benefit local areas. Congress has limited authority to make laws. It doesn't have limited authority to spend money. These are two different things and should not be confused. The only limits on Congress' ability to spend money are that it can only make an appropriation for the "Army" for a two year period, and 'from time to time' a 'complete accounting' of what money was appropriated and spent must be prepared.
If we want to FIX the mess we have with how our money is spent, then we are going to have to make some serious and sweeping changes in the structure of the legislative branch of our government.
One might ask why other countries, like the UK, which has a Parliament elected from districts don't have similar problems. In part they answer is that they do, but being a MUCH less geographically extended state the problem is a lot less apparent because the districts are much smaller and so close together that money going to any one district also benefits a bunch of other nearby ones. This makes it far easier for an MP to simply act in the general interest.
Travel times for a large ship would HAVE to be immense, not just large, but stupendous large. A massive ship that could sustain 100's of passengers for 10's of thousands of years in the hard radiation environment of interstellar space? Maybe it just can't be done. Maybe no kind of self replicating repair systems and AIs and whatever else would be needed is just possible to build in such a way as to give even a 1 in 1000 chance of success.
The amount of power that would be required to propel this massive ship would simply be truly astounding and nobody yet has demonstrated that it will ever be possible for humans to generate those sorts of power levels.
Maybe by the time you add up all the massive complex of equipment you need on top of the engine and the fuel required for the biggest thing we can launch there simply isn't enough room left for crew?
Maybe our new robotic overlords will be smarter than us and I salute our star drivin' overlords!
Einstein said that he did not believe in "spooky action at a distance". He never said anything about it being an argument based on relativity.
Yet this stuff has been proven time and time again. It is simply observed fact that no information is ever exchanged via quantum entanglement. It is not a matter of there being 500 possible ways it could happen and we've only eliminated 10. It is DEMONSTRATED not to happen at all.
You can start your research on that topic with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
âoeNo physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics."
This theorem has been demonstrated by experiment to hold, thus no transmission of information by QM AT ALL, ever.
Hope may spring eternal, but it is as futile a hope as that of the perpetual motion machine proponents. This also reinforces Relativity's ban on superluminal information/matter/energy but the two stand independent of one another. Thus you would have to overthrow BOTH theories at once, and thus ALL of the well attested standard model to get out of that jam.
Who says that interstellar travel is even possible? We don't even know what the limits of technology are, and humans, or anything resembling human may never leave this star system.
And if our technology DOES continue to advance like it is now, we'll certainly find a way to destroy ourselves because any energy large enough to launch starships will be a devastating weapon.
Not every human has to be wiped out either. Scattered weak humans without their tools and unaccustomed to surviving in the wilderness, they might not do so well in a toxic waste filled future earth.
And even a moderately large space civilization might not be able to untether itself 100% from the home planet, maybe not for 1000's of years.
What nobody is commenting on either is that who says 1000 years is at the short end of the estimate we should use? Maybe its more like 106 years, in which case this one is it ;) In that case the number of civilizations that are cut off from each other is REALLY large. A few will get lucky, most won't.
But that doesn't mean it isn't solved, or more like it isn't really a paradox.
What law of nature says that life bearing planets have to be common? Depending on what parameters you plug into the Drake Equation you may or may not have a problem.
It is perfectly easy for me to imagine that life, or at least intelligent technological life that wants to communicate with someone else, has arisen exactly ONE time in our galaxy. Or at least few enough times that we are unlikely to ever overlap with it.
Oh, yeah, we have this Congress which is elected district by district, so EVERY SINGLE BILL has to be a bonanza giveaway with something for everyone.
Don't blame Congress for this, the Constitution we have was designed for an 18th century agrarian society. No matter how carefully it was designed the resulting system cannot possibly be ideal for a modern 21st century post industrial society.
But cheer up, once the country has been misgoverned by this abomination into total collapse then the fascists will come in and fix everything.
Of course people could just wake up and realize they need to actually DO something about it now, but nah its easier to just sit on the couch, bitch about it, and have a few more chips and a beer.
The delta v between your typical Amor class earth crossing asteroid and the Earth-Moon system is on the order of a few meters per second. In other words if you could stand on it and chuck a rock, you could hit the Earth.
Existing propulsion technology could easily move one of these rocks around. It would be expensive and take time, but it could probably be done without requiring the invention of any fundamentally new technology.
A 100 meter diameter rock like Apophis would mass on the order of a gigaton or so. It would take a good bit of work, but it isn't at all unrealistic.
But I would wager that many people 100 years ago would have said that some of the things we observe today would remain forever hidden as well. Obviously if some part of the universe really is fundamentally unobservable and causally disconnected from the part we can observe then any theorizing (to use the term loosely) we might engage in relative to that is no more scientifically valuable than a fantasy novel.
But it may turn out that there are some subtle effects we can measure. Some formulations of quantum gravity seem to suggest we might be able to observe some effects of the configuration of the universe previous to the big bang for instance. Likewise if there is some sort of 'shadow universe' it might leave some mark on what we do observe. The two could have some very slight effect on each other or they might have influenced each other at a much earlier epoch in our universe's history that has left some trace.
Given that it seems our understanding of the architecture of the universe itself is still at a fairly elementary level there is a lot of terra incognita out there still. It will be interesting to see what sorts of discoveries we make in the next 100 years.